James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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Monday, February 1, 2016

William Utermohlen (1933-2007) was an American artist living in London who painted realistically when everyone else was doing Abstract Expressionism.

When he learned that he had Alzheimer's, he began a series of self portraits to chronicle the process of the disease.

Proportions become uncertain, strange bounding lines appear, and finally the features melt into a indistinguishable mass.

There's some debate about whether the paintings chronicle the effect of the disease on his capacity at visual processing and hand-eye skills, or whether they document his increasing feelings of confusion and disorientation.

In other words, was he struggling against the loss of his ability to produce a realistic painting, or was he using the language of modern art to make an expressive choice about his feelings?

Dr. Bruce Miller, a University of California neurologist, says, “Alzheimer’s affects the right parietal lobe in particular, which is important for visualizing something internally and then putting it onto a canvas." Utermohlen's wife, a professor of art history, says that he was using his art to understand the disease. She said, “The spatial sense kept slipping, and I think he knew.”

I wonder what his own thoughts were about the paintings - would he have said they were accurate in a visual sense, or rather an expression of his feelings. (Maybe the cited article covers this; I confess not to have read it.) More importantly, I hope he derived some satisfaction from continuing to create art, beyond a sort of personal scientific inquiry. I suspect he did, knowing that making art is as natural and necessary to some of us as eating.

I did not know this artist's work and was sorry to hear his story.It is very interesting to see the comment about loss of spatial perception. Dr Dennis Chan a scientist at the University of Cambridge is working on a computer app to test for the early stages of Alzheimers and this test will examine loss of spatial perception. It is expected to be a much better predictor than any test we have at the moment.

I'm interested to know which side of his face was the most comfortable to draw and if there was a shift to drawing himself from the left side. I'm assuming he used a mirror. I took care of a friend with early onset Alzheimer's. Her perceptions changed and deteriorated so quickly. I could see it in her hand written notes and in coloring books she used to enjoy coloring. It's terribly sad. But on another level these self portraits are fascinating. I'm sure they can give us some insight on perception and how the artist interprets the world they see.

That's just heartbreaking. I read an article that said that having a person with dementia look through a book of (fairly realistic) paintings was a good way to get that person talking when they otherwise did not talk much. It said they were able to look at the scenes and talk about what the people in the paintings were doing and what the story behind the painting was.